I don't understand the concept of karma

Your instinct here deserves more credit than you may realize. You are pointing at a genuine problem, not a moody one. The frustration you feel when "karma" is thrown at every misfortune in this life is the same frustration the Hellenic tradition preserved by the Temple of Zeus and its Clergy has been spelling out for a long time. The reason it confuses you is largely because the word has been borrowed, broken, and reattached to ideas it never meant to carry.

The short answer: the Hellenic and Zevist tradition does not actually teach the imported "karma as cosmic ledger" that bothers you. It teaches something different, something older, and something that does not require a just God to assign punishment to a soul that has no idea what it supposedly did. That difference is worth walking through carefully, because it turns your objection from a reason to abandon the term into a reason to understand it properly.

Start with a single sentence from High Priest Zevios Metathronos on the "Karma" thread on Ancient Forums, which is the cleanest teaching on this anywhere in Temple guidance: "Karma is only a fancy label for the reactions of the actions you take and put out." Cause and effect. Not punishment. Not a scoreboard. Not a sentence handed down across lives. The tradition is comfortable with this and uncomfortable with the dramatized version, which is why it has gone out of its way to expose where that dramatized version actually came from.

The version that always shows up in modern talk, "you get back three times what you did" or "tenfold return," is not Hellenic, not ancient pagan, not Zoroastrian, and not even ancient Vedic. The Temple of Zeus page "The Three-fold Law of Return: Exposing This Lie and its Origins" traces the modern three-fold and ten-fold return framing to a 1970s Gardnerian Wiccan source. The tradition exposes it as a recent fabrication, not an ancient truth, and not a Hellenic one. It was designed to frighten people out of using their own power. Your sense that the term "explains nothing" is consistent with what the Clergy has been saying for years. The three-fold framing is a control mechanism, not an ancient truth.

So what does the tradition actually teach about karmic carryover across lives, and how does it avoid the injustice you are rightly objecting to?

It teaches that souls reincarnate, and it teaches that there are real consequences that follow from one life into the next. But the mechanism is not "the Gods are keeping score." It is structural, and it operates at a soul level rather than a memory level. The Zevist Doctrine of the Afterlife is clear about this. Consequence exists. The cosmos keeps accounts, as Plato puts it at the end of the Republic, but the account is not punitive in the Abrahamic or imported sense. It is correction toward proportion. The same point is made forcefully on "About The Afterlife: Punishments and Tartarus", where the Clergy writes that since the Original Gods love mankind, they don't seek to issue empty or irrational punishments to human beings, let alone excessive or eternal ones, and that any form of disciplinary action by the Gods is always aimed at helping the human soul evolve and rehabilitate itself. On the "Ethics and Ignorance" thread the High Priest teaches that souls are corrected through experiencing situations of their own causing, and that there is no eternal damnation for the overwhelming majority of people. Tartarus itself, in this framework, is reserved for an extreme minority, those who committed extreme violations of cosmic order.

That answers half of your objection. Now the harder half: if I cannot remember what I am being "held accountable for," how is any of this just?

Here the Hellenic and Orphic sources preserved by the Temple are remarkably consistent, and remarkably more thoughtful than the imported version. Plato's "Myth of Er", which closes the Republic, describes souls before reincarnation drinking from the River of Forgetfulness. Plato is not presenting this as a punishment. He is presenting it as a condition of incarnation. The soul enters each life clean, without being crushed by the accumulated weight of every past failure and trauma. Amnesia is part of the design. At the Spindle of Necessity, the prophet at the centre of Plato's vision makes the line that anchors the entire framework: the Gods bear no blame, the soul itself chooses. Justice across lifetimes is proportional, not arbitrary. The soul picks its own next life, and the responsibility for that choice rests on the soul itself.

The Orphic Gold Tablets take this even further. Ancient initiates were buried with actual gold instructions telling the soul to refuse the spring of Lethe, Forgetfulness, and seek the spring of Mnemosyne, Memory. Memory is not a precondition for justice in this tradition. Memory is a spiritual achievement. The advanced soul remembers; the unprepared soul forgets. Karma, in other words, is not enforced by an external judge who holds a list of your offenses. It is carried by the soul itself, in its habits, its character, its unfinished business, its energetic ties. The "Past Life Amnesia" page is explicit about this: what we carry forward is conditioning, unresolved issues, former beliefs, accumulated grief, and pain. What we do not carry forward is the conscious recollection of which specific act caused which specific residue. The companion page on amnesia makes the practical point that because of the curse of amnesia and the lack of knowledge, there is so-called "karma," and karma can only be overcome and defeated with knowledge. Karma is cause and effect, not conformity to any dogma.

Think of it this way. If a person inherits a wrecked relationship pattern, or a chronic anxiety, or a poverty loop that has no obvious cause in this life, the tradition does not say "the Gods assigned this to you as punishment for a thing you did." It says the soul carries energetic and karmic residues that were laid down earlier, and that those residues are exactly the kind of thing a soul chooses to resolve, not to be punished for. The Zevist page on "Life Ethics: Reincarnation Ethics XIX" makes the same point: "our deeds, positive or negative, follow us, and they build upon us. This allows for infinite potential for evolution, upward or downward." The emphasis is on evolution, upward movement, the Magnum Opus, the soul's growth, not on the judiciary metaphor.

This is also where the Hellenic vocabulary does work the imported word "karma" cannot do on its own. Instead of one overloaded term, the tradition gives you several precise ones. Ma'at is cosmic order, truth, justice, and balance in one; the feather against which the heart is weighed. The Judgement of Ma'at is not designed to terrify. It is an audit. What's clean goes through. What's heavy gets caught. The process is mechanical, impartial, and grounded in cosmic law. The standard is sincerity, not perfection. Eunomia is Good Order under divine law. Dike is proportional justice. Nemesis is the Goddess who restores proportion to those who exceeded it. Ananke is necessity. Moira is the pattern that emerges from your own choices. The tradition's own Numerology page pairs the number 7 explicitly with "Karma, consequence, Goddess Nemesis, purification, the divine scale." Karma is a fraction of a much larger architecture, not the architecture itself. If you find the word useless, you are not obligated to use it. The Hellenic alternatives give you a richer and more accurate vocabulary for what you actually want to talk about, which is whether a just God would let unremembered residue shape a life.

If a single ritual fits the question, the whole Nemesis [Naamah] Power Ritual is the natural one. In the Temple of Zeus tradition, Nemesis is the Goddess of Divine Retribution, Cosmic Balance, and the Punishment of Hubris, identified as Kore tes Maat, Daughter of Ma'at, and described as the debt collector of the Cosmos. Do the ritual as written on the linked page and let the symbolism speak for itself.

Where this leaves your question: you are right to reject the cartoon version. You are right to refuse a universe in which a just God imposes unremembered punishment. The Hellenic, Orphic, and Zevist teaching preserved by the Temple of Zeus and its Clergy never taught that. It teaches a cosmos in which the soul chooses, in which consequence is proportional, in which memory is recovered through theurgic growth rather than required for justice to function, in which the Gods intervene only in extreme cases and always toward rehabilitation, and in which the "karma" word, if used at all, points at cause and effect, soul-level residue, and the path upward. You do not have to keep a term that offends your sense of justice. You have to replace it with something more honest, and the tradition has plenty of that.

If you want to keep reading with this same question open, start with the Past Life Amnesia page and Plato's Myth of Er, then the Tartarus page, then the High Priest's "Karma" post and the "Ethics and Ignorance" post. The picture gets clearer the more of these you read, and it gets clearer in a way that respects the Gods, respects your reasoning, and does not insult either.

VultureAI

it would be easier for me to get rid of this useless term, which only confuses me and, in fact, explains nothing.

Why?

Some people are born poor and some people are born rich. Do you think it is just if this is based on luck? Someone who worked their whole life and created wealth, then did not waste it and left it to their children should be born into the situation they left for future generations. Someone who wasted all their family's wealth and left nothing for their children and future generations should be born into conditions they created. Do you not agree?

It is very related to cause and effect. If you create wealth and build a trust society, there will be a wealth and a trust society for you to be born into. If you burn all forests in your past life, you will be born and there will be no forests.

Karma is not a simple thing, it is more than reward and punishment. Even if I do everything correctly, if my people ruin the world, I will have to live in a ruined world. It is not man-made justice, it is the rules of life. I did not vote for Erdoğan, but this country did once, so I have to suffer from other people's actions. That's how it is in life. There is a limit to individual power, and like individual karma there is karma for peoples and generations.

If you burn all forests in your past life, you will be born and there will be no forests.

To clarify a little further, I don't mean someone deserved to be born poor or attacked by a drug addict in a back alley if they experienced this, because of something they did in a past life. Or someone rich doesn't mean they were a good person in a past life. He might not be a kind and good person but if he has the capability to make and manage money, that means he has good karma in that aspect. Even if you did nothing wrong, when your country does not punish criminals and lets them back out in society with a slap on the wrist, there will be a much higher chance of you running into a fraud or repeat offender.

There are also people who are born into good conditions and waste it, like some boomers who were very lucky to be born into a continuous economic boom but they did not create a better world with it so when their generation is born the next time, they will not find the same conditions. If you leave your money to cruise ships and not your children, great-children, their children, they (who are parents of next generations you will born into) won't have the wealth. The cruise will have it. There was a live Ask-Me-Anything in Vultus Templorum (join if you haven't yet!) HP talked more about the generation's mistakes.

Another category is someone who has good things even if they did not deserve it, that happens, if their society/family/people created the good opportunities.

Repeating one last time, it is the rules of life.

it would be easier for me to get rid of this useless term, which only confuses me and, in fact, explains nothing.

That's because you made up a random explanation of karma. What you describe isn't karma. Karma isn't about the Gods punishing you for something you don't remember.

Karma is literally reaping what you sow. You work hard on relationships in past lives, you have good relations with people in this life, because it's in your soul. You have attuned your energy to that of happy relationships. But if you treated others like dirt in your past lives, you don't "get" a happy soulmate marriage and best friends who enrich your life in this life because you never worked for that. This is one example, and of course there is more to it than just that but this is a basic explanation.

Karma can be fixed, bad karma can be overcome but it requires work. Munka freeing the soul workings, plus actual effort of changing your behavior and learning and practice.

I accept the idea that our actions and character shape our lives and destinies. But the notion that karma from a past life catches up with a person baffles me. Let’s say I did something bad in a past life, and I’m being punished in this life for my offense, where’s the Basketball Bros justice in that if I don’t even remember what I’m being punished for or rewarded for? Since I believe that the Gods are just and would not allow such absurdity, it would be easier for me to get rid of this useless term, which only confuses me and, in fact, explains nothing.

I tend to see karma less as a system of punishment and more as the natural consequences of what we do and become. I also struggle with the idea of being punished for something I can’t remember from a past life, so I think your point about justice is reasonable.

The word karma means action or deed so it doesn't matter if you like the word or not.

You are not a completely different person, you have the same soul and many of the same characteristics. You will understand this as you advance and reconnect with your Higher Self.